Audio for dialogue

[Nazguli Tyvek]

Short version, I'm creating my own mods. I'm able to create characters, houses, quests, etc. However, the one thing I'm curious about is creating custom dialogue with sound for those characters. I recently discovered the program xVASynth and was looking up tutorials, however, it's requiring a subscription from nexus to get the voices. I didn't know if this was the best program/software for creating custom dialogue or perhaps there was something else?

[Frayed]

You don't need a nexus subscription to get the voice models, you only need that if you want to download them via the xVASynth program. You can just download the voice packs from Nexus optional files the normal way, then put them in the correct xVASynth directory. The instructions for that are on the mod page, you may have just overlooked them.

 

xVASynth is very convenient for getting Skyrim mods voiced, I've used it a fair bit recently. However, the quality of the generated voice lines can differ quite a bit between the different models. And though they can be quite good, they certainly won't rival some of the better AI speech gen out there, let alone the performance an actual voice actor could give 🙂 Still, it's a very useful tool.

Edited February 24 by Frayed

[Nazguli Tyvek]

4 hours ago, Frayed said:

And though they can be quite good, they certainly won't rival some of the better AI speech gen out there,

In your opinion what is the best speech gen out there for creating content for Skyrim mods? I'm trying to create a mod where I'm using unique models/characters so it's no big deal if I don't use vanilla Skyrim voices. I just want to avoid having an issue where everyone is silent or extremely limited in what they can say. 

[Frayed]

Honestly, I'm no authority on the matter. I've only used xVASynth myself, but @krzp provided me with some voice lines generated using Elevenlabs at some point which were really good. I'd suggest just looking around a bit yourself, tbh. AI stuff in general is a very fast-moving field, so what's best three months ago could have been surpassed again today already.

 

The biggest advantage of xVASynth though is that it's just very convenient. There's some xEdit scripts out there that allow you to generate the valid input for xVASynth directly from the .esp file of your mod, and an xVASynth plugin that makes it generate the .lip files as well, which together with xVASynth's batch generation makes it super easy to just generate quest dialogue in bulk. Other speech gen may beat it in quality, but they probably won't ever beat it in convenience.

Edited February 25 by Frayed

[Nazguli Tyvek]

16 hours ago, Frayed said:

Honestly, I'm no authority on the matter. I've only used xVASynth myself, but @krzp provided me with some voice lines generated using Elevenlabs at some point which were really good. I'd suggest just looking around a bit yourself, tbh. AI stuff in general is a very fast-moving field, so what's best three months ago could have been surpassed again today already.

 

The biggest advantage of xVASynth though is that it's just very convenient. There's some xEdit scripts out there that allow you to generate the valid input for xVASynth directly from the .esp file of your mod, and an xVASynth plugin that makes it generate the .lip files as well, which together with xVASynth's batch generation makes it super easy to just generate quest dialogue in bulk. Other speech gen may beat it in quality, but they probably won't ever beat it in convenience.

Thank you for the info. My Mod is still in its infancy but later on when I'm looking to put the finishing touches on it this will come in handy. 

[krzp]

On 2/25/2024 at 8:25 PM, Nazguli Tyvek said:

Thank you for the info. My Mod is still in its infancy but later on when I'm looking to put the finishing touches on it this will come in handy. 

There are 3 services that everyone seems to use for generating AI voiced lines for Skyrim

 

xVAsynth, Elevenlabs, TortoiseTTS

 

xVAsynth is the old reliable, most Vanilla voices are already available on the Nexus (you don't need anything besides the most basic account, but be prepared to spend some time downloading it, as there are a lot of voice modules - like 83 or so?), and there are a lot more available for other games, so nothing is stopping you from generating using even the non-Skyrim voices with it (I've used it to generate stuff with the Witcher 3 voices for Skyrim, heh). Downside? The quality is the weakest out of the three. It's by no means bad, but it's the most robotic option.

 

11Labs. Best sounding option, sounds better than human actors + there's an easy tool to generate fuz'es. However there are no known scripts that convert and rename them to CK's naming scheme, so I had to do it almost manually. And it's limited to 10k characters a month on a free version, so depending on your writing prowess, this will either take time - or money for a paid subscription tier with a bigger monthly quota 😃

 

Tortoise TTS - seems like an intriguing option, it's free, you could install it locally and, apparently could train it on Skyrim's voices. The resulting lines sound better than xVAsynth (worse than 11L, though, at least the one's that I've heard), but the installation process is confusing af, I couldn't wrap my head around it. 😶